Piazza Dante

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    bus: Dante

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Lonely Planet review

On hot summer evenings, Piazza Dante turns into a communal living room, packed with entire families who stroll, eat, smoke, play cards, chase balloons, whinge about the in-laws or simply sit and stare.

Dedicated to the Bourbon king Charles VII, it was known as the Foro Carolino until Italian unification in 1860 when it was renamed Piazza Dante. At the centre of the square, a sand-blasted marble Dante looks out over anarchic Via Toledo in arm-raised disbelief.

Below it all, the Dante metro station doubles up as a cutting-edge art space with installations from some art-world heavyweights. As you head down on the escalator, look up and catch Joseph Kosuth's Queste cose visibili (These visible things) above you. Eye-squintingly huge and neon, it's an epic quotation from Dante's Il Convivio .